The "back to normal’ people support policies counter to the outcomes they say they want.
Trump’s agenda in his 2024 campaign was the perfect synthesis of what they want - increased tariffs, reduced immigration and lower prices. There’s now a backlash against higher prices but no real reflection that the first two things led to the higher prices.
From my perspective, and using history as a guide, the United States shows all the signs of an empire in dissolution, and I believe the chief cause is internal decay.
Again, to me, the biggest sign of that is the man we have chosen to be the leader of this nation.Thirty years ago, he would have never be elected or even nominated. There are just too many things about him that are deal breakers. Now? The guy has routinely written executive orders defying the constitution and, in a televised act of sedition, he openly encouraged his supporters to overthrow the 2020 democratically elected president. His “punishment” was to be reelected in 2024. Heck, Nixon had to resign because he was spying on the opposition party, but this guy continues to prosper. That is a sign of OUR moral decay.
Part of the quite-successful Republican agenda too, gutting education and civics over the past few decades. Work everyone to death and don’t give them the tools to understand history or politics, much less enact change.
Meanwhile the Democrats just kept targeting the upper crust of coastal urbanites and disregarding the rest of what used to be their base. Their yardstick for success was elite prosperity with rainbow capitalism, not a thriving society for the typical person.
I think we’re long past the “event horizon” of the democratic doom spiral, and there’s no longer a way out of this degenerate state that doesn’t involve some form of significant collapse & rebuilding.
This. The only big power the D’s are hoping for is the power of subpoena, but even that may be worth little but theater.
This is the very last election that Mr. Trump will care about, so the “gloves will come off.” Informed diplomats and other insiders are expecting a bloodbath to begin against Iran soon after the election. This same disregard for human lives, American prestige and sanity will affect all future Trump decisions. And don’t forget that no matter how many D’s are elected Tuesday, they won’t take their seats until January.
Is it wishful thinking to imagine that 15 Repub Senators will care for America enough to vote to convict if the House impeaches? But that just puts Jeffrey Dahmer Vance in the Oval Office. (As Nixon may have picked Agnew as running mate to make his own removal distasteful, did Trump pick Vance as self-protection?)
Whatever happens, the Repub Party won’t disintegrate. How thoroughly have the powers in that Party (e.g. Rubio) been corrupted by greed and evil?
Let’s also not forget. as Trump mentioned recently, because the 2020 election was “stolen” from him he sees no reason why he can’t run in 2026. This was a serious statement. Not a joke. I know what the US Constitution says, but would the Supreme Court stop him if he tried? We now have a worst case scenario to think about.
Yes, because they owe no allegiance to him (but rather to the Heritage Foundation, who probably doesn’t want a senile man in his mid-late 80s dying in office). They’re also scared of the extreme blowback that would come from this. Though I expect Alito and Thomas would dissent.
Honestly, based on previous rulings, they’d probably say that he should be on the ballot, and then, if elected, it would be up to the Electoral College (House, and whole series of Responsible Institutions) to find him unqualified and refuse to seat him. By which point the Electoral College (House, etc.) would be afraid of going against the Will of the People, and swear his demented geriatric near-corpse into office.
However low the probability is that Trump will be impeached and convicted, I think the likelihood of Vance becoming POTUS is even lower. My reasoning is that if things get so bad that there are enough Republican senators who are willing to convict, they will almost certainly be impeaching and convicting Vance at the same time. We’d be looking at a President Jeffries, not Vance.
I am very much anticipating the moment a high profile Republican declares himself a candidate for POTUS in 2028. Doing so explicitly states that You Know Who won’t be and Don would be facing his first competition for attention from within.
I think those will be triggering events for him.
I haven’t noticed this. Certainly not Obama, Harris, or Biden.
Which rulings are these? If you’re referring to Trump v. Anderson, that was only a question of the 14th Amendment, whereas the 22nd Amendment is a little more straightforward. I mean, determining whether someone was engaged in insurrection should require a little more than the say-so of a state functionary, whereas everyone around can count to two and see that he’s no longer eligible to run.
Yes, that’s what I was referring to. They said that states (who issue the ballots) cannot determine eligibility for federal elections, only feds (who don’t run said elections). So that means whether it’s an obvious yes, an obvious no, or a maybe, states are not to weigh in, which means they can and indeed must put ineligible people on the ballot even if they KNOW they’re ineligible.
That’s my layperson’s understanding. If I’ve misunderstood, please correct me, but I don’t think it was about whether he was or wasn’t eligible so much as whether the people running the elections could say so.
I mean, I talked about why above. The 14th Amendment requires more than state say-so, but that doesn’t mean the 22nd Amendment does. (EDIT: And Trump v. Anderson was argued only on the basis of section 3 of the 14th Amendment.)
I suppose its possible to say that all the Republican-appointed justices will say there’s no difference between the 14th and the 22nd on this issue, but pure and simple, the former relies on a more subtle determination of fact, whereas the latter is as simple as establishing that Donald Trump has, in fact, served more than 1 1/2 terms as president.
Justices may be able to be sufficiently obscurantist to say that January 6th may not have been an insurrection, but it’s pretty hard for them to say that, as of noon, January 20th of next year, Trump hasn’t served 1 1/2 terms as president.
Yes, this would be a very blatant ignorance of fact and there have been no previous rulings as bold as that. This would be a major escalation from anything they’ve done before, and I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect that they would suddenly turn reactionary to this degree. I also don’t think they’d be brave enough to do so. Even Thomas and Alito would probably find some weaselly way to object, some nitpicking thing that ignores the real substance of the issue if they were to dissent from the rest of the body in denying Trump’s claim.
My reasoning would be that getting 15 or so Republicans willing to switch GOP presidents would be easier than getting 15 or so Republicans willing to give the presidency to the enemy.
Then, it is all so low probability.
Maybe it is best case because a lot of swing voters would dislike the idea of Donald Trump trying for a third term. Donald’s ticket would lose.
As to who has the authority to enforce the constitutional qualifications for office, I think it is the voters.
There are some among us who believe that it is not unreasonable to say there was chicanery in the '24 election. It is well known that the Rs put signifcant effort into targeting election offices in order to massage the results in favor of Felon-ONE. The “will of the voters” is a questionable claim anymore.
Can you elaborate on what this means?
Here is a Politico piece from '23 in which they discuss what was happening at the time. I know this sounds a bit GregPalast-y (a guy who always rubbed me the wrong way), but it still gives me anxiety. The next few weeks are likely to be a shitstorm.
Yes, this is the kind of BS they’ve been doing along with REDMAP. This is a known and documented problem. This is what Republicans are trying to pull off when they realize they can’t actually get enough votes to stay in power when everything is fair.